A federated grid environment with replication services

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In general, grids are classified as computational grids, data grids and access grids. Computational grids address applications that deal with complex and time intensive computational problems usually on relatively small data-sets; whereas data grids address the needs of data intensive applications that deal with the evaluation and mining of large amounts of data in the terabyte and petabyte range. While SORCER is basically a computation grid environment, a complementing data grid service called Replica Provider is introduced. To have an increased functionality, the newly developed data grid service is used to leverage the already existing SORCER compute grid. SORCER Service Oriented Programs along with replication services will now have a capability of running data grid applications. Advances in sequencing technology have created a tremendous amount of data to be analyzed. Therefore, there is an increased need to have distributed BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) capabilities that will support easy deployment and enable large batch BLAST processes over heterogeneous platforms. Data Grid will help in maintaining and updating such databases in a distributed computing environment easily and efficiently. It will optimize access to such databases and increase reliability by replicating these at multiple locations. A federated grid environment for BLAST (S-BLAST) developed in a federated distributed environment is presented. SBLAST enables processing of large sequence files distributed over diverse system architectures and computing resources. It also enables large number of files to be replicated on multiple nodes over different heterogeneous computation platforms simultaneously for providing generic service providers fast, up-to-date, reliable and secure access to file storage.